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For years it fed the homeless, and now it will feed the spirit of aspiring entrepreneurs and innovators by providing a place to share ideas, learn about starting and growing businesses and participate in skill-building programs.

The city of Albuquerque plans to open a new “Epicenter” for entrepreneurs in March at the former Noon Day Ministries facility at the old First Baptist Church site at Broadway and Central Downtown. The University of New Mexico bought that property last July with financial assistance from the city, county, federal government and New Mexico Educators Federal Credit Union (now Nusenda Credit Union) as ground zero for the planned Innovate ABQ high-tech research and development district.

UNM owns the seven-acre property, but it leased the two-story, 13,500-square-foot Noon Day Ministries building at zero cost to the city to allow it to launch the Epicenter as Innovate ABQ’s first on-site program, said Mayor Richard Berry during a public tour on Tuesday.

“It will be a community center that focuses on entrepreneurship, on economic mobility,” Berry said. “It’s a place for all comers to teach, learn and inspire entrepreneurship.”

Albuquerque Economic Development Director Gary Oppedahl said the Epicenter will provide a gathering spot for those who feel disenfranchised or left out of the entrepreneurial ecosystem to get involved and feel welcomed.

“We want all hipsters, hucksters and hackers to gather in one place to share and connect about what they’re doing,” Oppedahl said. “We want the Epicenter to have a beehive effect.”

Apart from offering a gathering place, the city and collaborating organizations will host a range of events and skills-building activities at the center, such as digital literacy and computer hacking workshops.

The city will also launch a new food vendor training program there for people who want to operate food trucks, stands or other such enterprises. The facility has a commercial kitchen on site that was, until recently, used by Noon Day Ministries to serve meals to homeless and low-income people.

“We want to teach entrepreneurs to safely and effectively run a food court,” Berry told the Journal.

The city could spend about $25,000 to renovate the facility before it opens in March, although city staffers are now assessing and evaluating it. The facility includes a large basketball court on the ground floor, and a string of offices on the second floor.

The local philanthropist group Cinco Amigos, in cooperation with the Albuquerque Community Foundation, raised $137,000 as a donation to equip the Epicenter with a Wifi network and desks, tables and chairs. The city will supply computers.

The Epicenter’s Innovate ABQ location may be temporary, as UNM is awaiting a master plan from the design firm Perkins & Will, due in March. The plan could call for tearing down that building, or renovating it for other purposes, but UNM decided to lease it to the city anyway for up to two years, said UNM Chief Economic Development Officer Lisa Kuuttila.

By: Kevin Robinson-Avila (Albuquerque Journal)

Click here to view source article.

Optimism was in the air in early 2007 when preliminary plans got underway for a four-story housing project a block south of Central Avenue at the east end of Nob Hill.
“Over the next decade, you’re going to see the entire landscape in that area change,” Chicago-based developer Rick Goldman told the Journal in an article from February of that year.
Goldman was a pioneer in Nob Hill redevelopment in the mid-2000s with his 20-townhome first phase of Aliso Nob Hill fronting Morningside Park, a few blocks east of Carlisle SE. He had just begun construction of Aliso’s second phase when he announced the four-story project just up Silver Avenue.
Then the Great Recession happened.
“The bottom fell out,” he said last week. “We hunkered down and waited out the storm. That’s what everybody did. It wasn’t an Albuquerque thing, it was a nationwide thing.”
Flash forward eight years and that four-story housing project, now called Platinum Apartments, is the first new infill development of the 2010s in what’s called “emerging Nob Hill,” the area straddling Central from Carlisle east to Washington.

Although the project was officially undertaken by a limited liability company, Goldman said the developer is Golden Spike Development, which he co-founded in 2004 with partner Ike Hong. The city building permit puts the construction value at just over $6.1 million.
The 60,000-square-foot building, which is scheduled for completion in July, will have 75 apartments ranging in size from 565 to 1,352 square feet on the upper three floors. The ground floor will be gated and have 74 parking spaces, plus the leasing office, a fitness center and other common space.
All the apartments will have a balcony or porch, a washer and dryer, Energy Star-rated appliances and high-end finishes, said Carlos Conroy, project manager for Pavilion Construction, the Oregon-based general contractor that’s made a name for itself in New Mexico by building low-income housing tax-credit projects.
Platinum Apartments is market-rate, meaning it will have no income restrictions on tenants like a tax-credit project, prompting Conroy to say, “We’re diversifying our job portfolio here with this project.”
Fundamentals stay strong
With an address of 4100 Silver SE, the 0.85-acre site spans a full block between Sierra and Montclaire. The property was assembled from three parcels, giving it a size that’s rare in an old, established neighborhood like Nob Hill, Goldman said.

The intervening years between late 2007 and early 2013, when the project was rebooted, saw lending disappear for speculative commercial real estate projects, causing the five-year delay in the project, Goldman said. The four apartments and a small office building on the half-vacant property at the time were leased.
“It wasn’t long after the thaw in the banking industry that we were at it,” he said, noting that the passage of those five years hadn’t changed his optimism.
“The fundamentals have remained strong despite the ups and downs of the economy. We always felt good about the access of the site and the overall strength of the location,” he said.
A project like Golden Spike’s four-story apartment building wouldn’t have been possible 10 years ago because of height restrictions. The passage of the Nob Hill Highland Sector Development Plan in 2007, subsequently amended, allows taller buildings in the Central Avenue corridor.
“That was a pretty seminal moment,” Goldman said.
Platinum Apartments has a building height of 54 feet, which compares to 45 feet for CenturyLink’s switching hub for phone calls a couple blocks north at 120 Sierra NE. Built in 1960, the switching hub was the tallest commercial building in Nob Hill’s Central Avenue corridor.
In early January, the city of Albuquerque received proposals from private developers to redevelop the now-derelict De Anza Motor Lodge at 4301 Central NE, a little over three blocks away from Platinum. Built in 1939 and purchased by the city in 2003, the 2.1-acre De Anza site has some historical significance.
The submitted proposals won’t be made public until they’re presented to the Albuquerque Development Commission in early March.
Depending on how the redevelopment proposals are structured financially – specifically whether government subsidies are involved – the De Anza redevelopment will likely involve some demolition of existing buildings and construction of a new four-story building or buildings.

Energy efficiency
Goldman said Platinum Apartments is the first market-rate apartment built as urban infill in Albuquerque since the 198-unit Albuquerque Uptown Village at 2222 Uptown Loop NE opened in 2009. Located in an employment hub with plenty of shopping nearby, Uptown Village is widely considered a major success.
“Uptown Village has consistently outperformed both its submarket and the Albuquerque apartment market in general,” said multifamily broker Billy Eagle at commercial real estate services firm CBRE, who tracks the apartment market.
“Since 2009, its average occupancy has been 97 percent and rents have continually set the bar in Albuquerque due to its superior location, amenities and walkability,” he said.
Goldman expects Platinum Apartments to score the same level of success. Platinum’s name was inspired in part by the fact it is designed by Environmental Dynamics Inc., often shortened to “edi,” to achieve platinum certification from the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program.
The green, energy-efficient design starts with the building site’s orientation toward the sun, explained Environmental Dynamics principal Stace McGee.

The topic of right to work generates much discussion these days about whether it is worthwhile for New Mexico to adopt this type of legislation. Unfortunately, a lot of the dialog misses the point and focuses on the wrong questions.
The reason to adopt right to work is because New Mexico needs jobs – lots of them. We need to pull our population out of poverty. We need to create opportunities that will keep our children in New Mexico.
Jobs and more job opportunities are the best way to accomplish that.
The site selection industry, those people whose job it is to help companies pick new locations, often use right to work as a screening factor for their clients to eliminate locations and to narrow choices. If a state doesn’t check the box that says they are a right-to-work state, an estimated one-third to one-half of relocating or expanding companies simply will not consider that state in their location choices.
New Mexico has a great story to tell, and many companies that have moved here can and do attest to that. However, if they won’t even consider us, we lose the opportunity to tell that story.
We lose jobs.
Right-to-work legislation won’t be the solution to all of our state’s problems. It’s not a silver bullet. A location’s workforce – its quality, cost and availability – is a major factor in a company’s site selection decision.
And, New Mexico needs a deeper, qualified labor pool to be competitive.
On-the-job experience is one of the best ways of improving the quality and availability of the workforce. Were we able to attract more companies, our citizens would be able to find more employment opportunities here in New Mexico versus going out of state.
We want to stress that we do not propose right to work as an anti-union strategy. right to work does not prevent workers from unionizing or joining unions.
What it does do is give the worker the choice of not paying union dues if they do not wish to join the union. In turn, the National Labor Relations Act allows unions to negotiate contracts covering only dues-paying members.
As with any membership organization, unions depend on dues to operate and pursue their goals. Likewise, as with any membership organization, it will be up to unions to demonstrate their value in order to gain and retain members.
In trying to create better opportunities for all New Mexicans, we need an all-out effort to make ourselves as competitive as possible for attracting new jobs. Right to work is only a piece of the solution.
Part of that effort must include fixing our education system. Another part must be improving our tax code.
Similarly, we need robust economic development incentives such as the proposed $50 million Job Creation Fund unanimously endorsed by the bipartisan New Mexico Legislative Jobs Council.
All of these are steps toward attracting more employers to New Mexico, steps to diversifying our economy.
The beauty of right-to-work legislation is that is does not have a cost to taxpayers, does not require any expenditures of our state reserves, or even any part of the state’s annual budget. It is however, another important economic development tool that can bring more potential jobs to our doorstep.
By: Kurt Browning (Albuquerque Journal)
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Thanks to all of the brokers, sponsors and guests who attended the February 2015 CCIM Deal Making Session and to those who shared the February 2015 CCIM Properties. Over 15 million dollars of commercial real estate properties available for sale were presented from all over New Mexico.

Brett Hills & Calder Conrad	700 S. Salano Drive	$185,000
Martha Carpenter	3900 Georgia Street NE	$980,000
Anne Apicella	1133 Dakota Street SE	$325,000
Walt Arnold & Larry Ilfeld	100 N. Guadalupe	$3,095,000
Anne Apicella	141-155 Wyoming Blvd NE	$482,200
Gannon Coffman	SWQ Camelot Blvd & Golden Gate Drive	$386,976
Martha Carpenter & Anne Apicella	4290 Corrales Road	$405,000
John Henderson	1001 Coal Avenue	$2,300,000
Coralee Quintana	427 Isleta SW	$589,000
Gannon Coffman	3485 Main Street	$283,500
Coralee Quintana	6616 Central Ave SE	$499,000
Gannon Coffman & Keith Meyer	SEQ NM Hwy 6 & Los Cerritos	$6,142,613